I say, “Oh,” in a way that means, I might actually die if you don’t stop talking.
He shrugs and shakes his head as he pulls the cup away from the machine. “Figures, so typically American, right? Now it’s served all over Europe. Americans always expect to be catered to. Sorry, did you say you want milk in this?”
I try to keep a blank expression and pray, Jesus Lord, help me not to hurt this young man as I reply, “Listen, you Kansas-ass motherfucker, you would know what I said if you were doing your job instead of trying to teach me a history lesson. Now give me my coffee with milk in it and can I please have some shut-the-fuck-up with that?”
No, c’mon, I didn’t say that. I’m depressed and angry but I’m not a total asshole. What I said was “Whole milk, thank you.” But I thought it and it made me smile.
I do the mother shuffle to leave the cafe: one hand on the stroller, one holding the coffee, back my ass into the door to open it. For a second I can hear Juvenile telling me to “Back that azz up” and a flash of me—the me before Johnny and Harry and Rocky—dancing with some guy in some club flickers in front of my eyes. That girl wouldn’t believe it if she saw me now. I laugh out loud. I feel lighter.
But the feeling ends when I see my reflection in the cafe window outside. My hair’s an awkward length, limp and frizzy. Harry’s white button-down shirt, which I thought made me look casually classic and not still pregnant, clings to the curve of my stomach in this light, the buttons in the middle sticking out farther than the others. A patch of sweat spreads under my arm. The black maternity leggings are baggy around the knees. Did I show up at Johnny’s school like this? Coffee drips stain the front of my shirt.
I watch a girl, maybe twenty years old, walk past my reflection and into the coffee shop. Asymmetric hot-pink mini-dress under a cropped faux-fur jacket. Her white ankle boots—pointed, sculpted, architectural—have arrived from another galaxy. But her eyeliner is smudged and her hair is swept up in a careless mess on top of her head with an ancient turquoise scrunchie, as though her hair doesn’t know how incredible the rest of her looks. But London girls dress like that. Like a chipped manicure—smooth and pretty except for that jagged, edgy, gritty corner on the index finger where the polish came off. I watch her order coffee and I feel ridiculous and ugly and old, embarrassed to put my big, outdated sunglasses on, but desperate to hide behind something.
Ding. A text from Stacy breaks my stare.
Hey G what’s going on?
Me:
Nothing. Wait, isn’t it 4 in the morning there? You OK?
Stacy:
Yeah, baby’s sick, been up all night. Now I can’t sleep. Hey, you will not believe this
Me:
What
Stacy:
Tina caught Joey last night at Jesse’s house. Finally
Me:
That bastard
Stacy:
I know. She’s not giving back the ring. I told her not to
Me:
Good. She shouldn’t. How’s the kids?
Stacy:
They’re good, look at this
A picture of her son, Christopher, in his Tiny Tikes baseball uniform. Next, a picture comes through of her nails. A mint-green manicure with pastel yellow on the ring finger of each hand.
You like my nails?
Me:
Love them
Stacy:
Matches the baby’s party theme. Bunnies and chicks. You know springtime shit
Me:
Wish I could be there. I’m not doing so good today actually can you delete, delete, delete, delete…
I delete can you talk later because a picture of baby Melissa comes through, in a lacy baby ball gown, stiff crinoline under the skirt. She’s about to turn one. Stacy puts frilly headbands on her bald head so people know she’s a girl. A tiny gold baby stud glitters in each ear. She’s smiling. A living cupcake.
I type:
She’s beautiful. I got to go. Have fun at her party
Stacy:
Send me some pics, I want to see this kid
Me:
OK
But there are no pics to send of Rocky from my phone. Harry takes all the pictures.
I have no pictures Stace because I don’t really want to remember this time—delete, delete, delete, delete, delete
Me:
Love you
Stacy:
Love you
On the way into Sainsbury’s I see the old man on the bench outside the pound shop. I’ve seen him on that bench every day since we moved here. Bloated. Pockmarked. The skin on his hands is taut, straining against the swollen alcoholic’s flesh beneath. Sometimes he reads a newspaper cast off by some commuter. Sometimes he sits with a can—cider, lager, alco-pop. Sometimes he just sits, part of the ecosystem of the street, like the post box on the corner and the aging red phone booth.
I was walking Johnny to school one day a couple months back when I saw him passed out on the sidewalk, surrounded by people calling 999 on their cell phones. A stroke or a heart attack, I didn’t know, I just rushed Johnny past so he wouldn’t see and said a prayer. But he’s back on the bench today. So neither of us is dead. I guess that’s something.
There’s a lot of characters like him in this neighborhood. The Chinese lady who comes out of the corner store with a jug of milk strapped into a stroller like it’s a baby. The Indian lady in her Technicolor saris who always wears socks with flip-flops, even in the rain, even in winter, and walks the streets picking up abandoned newspapers, re-folding them and then packing them into her rolling shopping cart. The old dude with the long white beard on the mobility scooter who drives down the middle of the street daring the cars not to give way to him. The bald lady singing Polish folk songs and feeding the birds in the Waitrose parking lot. The people most people see and try not to look at with stories they don’t want to know.
Once I’m in the store, I walk around noticing the displays that have changed since yesterday. Today there’s samples for a new salted-caramel Taste the Difference cake. I grab some on my way to the wine aisle. There’s another mother there with a toddler who’s making her crazy and a baby sleeping in a pram. She’s not one of the toned Pilates mums you see around here. Neither am I. We’re both fat, exhausted and defeated, but we feel no solidarity. We just glance at each other to see which one of us is smaller, because if you’re the smaller one, well, at least that’s one person who’s fatter than you.
I put two small 200 ml bottles of wine in my basket for elevenses later. Elevenses in Britain is your mid-morning snack break. But at 11 a.m., instead of tea and cake, I have my first glass of wine. Just one. Just to stay calm. Same thing at 2 p.m., then at 4 and then one between 6 and 7 p.m. to get through the bedtime routine. Every few hours, like medicine. Wine wraps my feelings in gauze and then they don’t feel so sharp. I don’t yell so much. And I’m not the only one.
In America, unless she did it all in private, a mother couldn’t drink this way all day. But here it’s easy to do, and there’s lots of us who do it. You know us. We’re the ones taking the kids to PizzaExpress after school so we can get a glass of wine at 4:30 on a Monday. The ones at parents’ evening who take the first polite glass and then grab a “cheeky” second one on the way to the curriculum meeting because at private school your fees get you wine in a bucket at the door to the classroom. It’s not hard to find wine during the day. It’s right there in the supermarket, the corner shop, the gas station, the playdate, the soft-play center, the kids’ party, the children’s museum cafe. Sanity, clarity, a healthy marriage, a therapist—those are all a lot harder to find.
I buy little bottles, two or three at a time, enough to have a glass every four hours. I take the emp
ty ones with me when I leave the house so Harry doesn’t see them. I don’t throw them away; I faithfully recycle them in the glass bin outside Sainsbury’s as penance. I know how ridiculous that is.
I step up to the cashier with my mini wine, formula, chocolate Hobnobs and toilet cleaner—a summary of my life laid out on the checkout conveyor belt. The teenage girl in her bright pink hijab at the register says, “Hello,” smiles and makes eye contact. She recognizes me, I’m in here enough. She politely averts her gaze, as she always does, from judging my shopping, but she’s too young to sell me alcohol so she has to raise her hand to get the floor manager to clear the purchase for her. How I must look to this girl, how feeble and pathetic I must seem in my daily pilgrimage for tiny bottles of wine to hide from my husband while she’s in here working, probably saving money for school. I wonder how her mother raised her to be such a good kid.
She says, “Aren’t they lovely when they’re asleep,” gesturing at Rocky in the stroller.
“Best part of the day,” I say.
She smiles and she thinks I’m joking, but I’m not.
8 p.m.
Another end to another day, which could have been yesterday or the day before and will be the same as tomorrow. The baby’s asleep, Johnny’s in his PJs watching David Attenborough. Harry’s finally home. Johnny runs to him. They wrestle, read a story, and Harry puts him to bed. I kiss Johnny good night. He hugs me tight. He still loves me, but I can feel his relief that Harry’s here and the day is over. Or that the day with me is over.
I’m in the kitchen microwaving some frozen dinners. I wonder when Harry will notice the window. Right away, it turns out.
“What happened here?” He points at it, loosening his tie and reaching for a bottle of wine in the fridge.
“Neighbor kid, hit a cricket ball over the fence.”
“Well, have you spoken to them? Will they pay for it? Do they know what these cost?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. It was an accident. They offered to pay right away. I talked to them. I called the company to get a quote.” Lies. I realize too late that the glass is broken from the inside, pushing the glass out. It’s not dented inward like it would be if a ball hit it the way I said it did. This is a major hole in my story. Harry must be tired because he hasn’t noticed. Or maybe he has but he doesn’t want to know the truth, because knowing the truth will mean that he will have caught me in a lie. Will mean that he knows something is wrong with me. Will mean that he’ll have to do something about it.
He sits down at the table and I put a microwave curry in front of him, a lo-cal risotto for me.
“This looks great, Gigi, thank you.” It’s disgusting but he’s too tired to care. “Anything else of note happen today?” He digs into the fluorescent-yellow rice.
How do I answer?
Actually, it was me. I cracked the window when I threw Johnny’s truck at it.
Or:
I started drinking at eleven this morning because the sight of myself in the cafe window made me cry.
Or:
Johnny’s teacher told me that he went to the headmaster’s office today because he punched that little shit who keeps bullying him because I told him to.
Or:
I’m so homesick my body aches.
Or:
Please help me. I’m in so deep I can’t get out.
But I don’t say any of those things. Instead I go with “You know that old drunk on the bench who I thought was dead? Turns out he’s not.”
Harry says, looking at me, fork in midair, “Well, that is good news.” We eat in silence. Forks clanging on plates.
After dinner we sit on opposite ends of the sofa. Harry says, “Oh, the new season of Game of Thrones is out,” and he flips through the channels to find it. I say, dismissively, “Dragon porn,” and I curl up thinking I’ll catch a nap on the sofa for an hour before Rocky wakes up.
Harry is silent for a moment until he says, looking at the TV, “Newt rom-com.”
I sit up and scramble until I think of “Mouse thrillers.” I smile, remembering when we played Last Letter Game that time we were stuck at JFK for six hours.
Then Harry says, “Scorpion drama,” and I start to laugh; we both do.
I blurt out, “Armadillo horror!”
He yells, “Rat art house!”
I stammer, “Eel comedy!”
He shouts, “Yellow-billed loon…yellow-billed loon…uh…um…dammit, I’m out.”
I say, “Get outta here, what’s a yellow-billed loon?”
He says, “It’s an Arctic bird.”
I say, “Oh my God, you’re an Arctic bird.” We laugh. It’s nice. It used to be easier.
I move down the sofa to be closer to him, because I think I want to say, I think I’ll try to say—but then, Rocky’s cries come over the monitor. Khaleesi, the mother of dragons, makes a breathless speech on-screen. Harry watches her. Our moment is over. He doesn’t move to go upstairs and I’m too tired to ask him to, knowing the argument it will start. I go give Rocky his bottle. And cry.
London, April 2016; Baby, 4 months old
How does she open that window? Can I ask her to open it, no, that’s weird it’s raining how does she open it if I really had to could I break it? Go to the bathroom until it’s over. What do I do with the baby? No, don’t go to the bathroom. You’ll get trapped in there. Don’t go anywhere just pretend nothing’s happening.
Gigi? C’mon now. Get your shit together.
I can’t, I can’t. My hands are numb my hands are numb that means I’m not breathing.
Of course you’re breathing, Gigi.
I’m not breathing there’s no air.
Of course there’s air, Gigi.
Don’t drop the baby don’t drop the baby.
Jesus Christ, Gigi.
Here it comes, rising lava climbing, climbing, back of knees, waist, spine, between the shoulder blades, back of neck, the heat, the heat, I can’t…
Gigi, count!
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8 and…
“And you, Gigi? Cake?” Sukie asks me, breaking the trance of the panic. She can’t tell I’m immersed in hot lava on her sofa.
Try to answer. If you can answer you can breathe.
I sputter, stutter, find words somewhere in the back of my throat. “Um, no, no, thanks, it looks great but I’m on a diet.” I swallow, hard. Push the lava down. Focus, look at them, listen, listen to every word, count…So I do. I try to focus even though my eyes feel like they’re melting under the heat. We’re in Sukie’s big Victorian house. We’re all holding our babies. Sitting on overstuffed sofas around a cream-colored coffee table. The table looks old, like it came from Sukie’s great-aunt’s barn. Its paint is distressed. Like me.
Fiona, a living stick figure in an outfit that highlights the flatness of her post-partum stomach, says, “Oh, I need to be on a diet too—I’ve never eaten so much cake!” All the ladies laugh. They nod and agree about how ravenous breastfeeding makes them, how they eat constantly, how they’re going to keep breastfeeding as long as possible so they can keep eating cake. Ha, ha, ha, they laugh with that laugh they all got from their John Lewis wedding registries, along with the set of matching Le Creuset cookware.
I’m coming down from the wave now. It lasts only a few minutes but always feels like hours. It started in the hospital the night he was born. I thought it was probably all the drugs I was on. But it hasn’t stopped. It gets me in confined spaces. Distraction helps. For instance, I’m keeping my mind busy wondering if Fiona made that diet joke because, even though I’m the fattest girl in the room, she doesn’t think I’m that fat. So she doesn’t think that joke will offend me because I’m one of them. But I know that, really, she’s just sparked a skinny-girl conversation and they’r
e all just ignoring me while they eat the cake that I don’t. At least none of them noticed the wave. Most people are too self-absorbed to notice a woman drowning on land anyway.
Count.
Four blondes, two brunettes including me. Sometimes I forget which blonde has which baby, they’re all so similar, but one of them’s Australian so that helps. There’s a Geordie, Tracy, who I thought was Irish or Scottish at first, I knew it was a different accent, but then she said something about growing up in Newcastle. So I said, “Oh, do you have an ass tattoo like Cheryl?” But no one laughed. I thought it showed that I knew who Cheryl Cole was and that I could join in on British pop-culture conversations but it didn’t come out right. It was the wrong thing to say. Tacky. Now they suspect I’m a chav. That’s like white trash. They weren’t sure before, me being American threw them off, but now they suspect I’m not middle class like them after all.
I’m here with them only because, by shitty coincidence, Sukie’s married to Gareth, who works with Harry, and we ended up in the same local birth-prep class, held in the fluorescent lit, freezing basement of the Salvation Army, right after AA was done and next door to the weekly Slimming World meeting. That’s like Weight Watchers. The surroundings for this magical time of our lives could not have been bleaker or more British. But I went with it, and every week me and Harry sat with the others and listened to the crazy hippie teacher predict dire futures for our babies if we used baby wipes and didn’t breastfeed and had epidurals. One time, she did a half-hour on home births, because the NHS encourages them (yeah, I know) and my all-day, all-pregnancy morning sickness kicked in, right there, in the middle of the room. All I could think to say was, “Sorry, the baby just wanted to let me know that there’s no way in hell we’re having a home birth.” Everyone laughed.
Once the classes were over and the due dates got nearer Sukie organized it so that we kept meeting during our mat leaves and now here we are—every week on Wednesday at each other’s houses in rotation. I go most weeks because I know that if I don’t show up then Sukie will say something to Gareth and at some point Harry will find out, in some casual conversation in the queue at Pret, and then he’ll get suspicious about what I do with my days. And with the baby.
When I Ran Away Page 18